The long-vacant storefront at the southwest corner of Robson and Thurlow streets is about to be revitalized into a massive flagship store for Aritzia.
The Vancouver-based women’s wear retailer currently operates a store on Robson Street just west of the corner building that it plans to expand into. Its plan is to have a gigantic flagship store that Aritzia pegs at 13,027 square feet.
What’s more is that the 54-location Aritzia chain also operates a separate 3,000-square-foot store, branded Wilfred, immediately west of its current Robson Street location.
"[The intersection of Robson and Thurlow streets] is arguably one of the most prominent corners in Vancouver and some would say in Canada," Aritzia's chief marketing officer Oliver Walsh told Business in Vancouver.
The flagship store would operate underneath the Red Robin burger restaurant that has operated at the corner for decades and flow west along Robson Street.
That means that it will also absorb units in the building that were previously a Bell store, a Skylight Optical location and a Dynamite Clothing store. In all, Aritzia will lease an additional 4,837 new square feet.
“We will open early in 2016,” Walsh said.
The corner of Robson and Thurlow streets is an historic intersection for the retail sector.
The southwest corner housed Vancouver’s third Starbucks coffeeshop – an extremely successful café that opened in 1988. Serpentine line-ups flowed down the street in 1990 as customers waited up to an hour to get to the till – seen personally by this reporter.
This, along with rumours that the building owner planned to demolish the site, prompted the Seattle coffee chain’s CEO Howard Schultz to embark on what was then an unheard of retail strategy of opening another coffee shop kitty corner on the same intersection – in March 1991.
That second Starbucks still operates on the northeast corner of the intersection, in the Manhattan Building.
“Schultz’ gamble had it the jackpot – amazingly, his two Robson Street coffeehouses soon became the best- and second-best performing stores in the chain,” wrote Taylor Clark in his book Starbucked.
“The bizarreness of this point begs to be reemphasized: Starbucks’ top two stores were fifteen yards away from each other.”
That phenomenal success spearheaded Starbucks’ now well-known cluster-bomb strategy of locating stores near each other.
That original Starbucks building on the southwest corner of Robson and Thurlow streets is long demolished.
The current, larger building that replaced it housed a new Starbucks café until May 2012, when the company told BIV that it was closing because it could not agree to lease terms, such as a demolition clause, with the building owner.
Jay Lirag, who is vice-president of development, leasing and marketing for the building’s owner, Deecorp Properties Ltd., told BIV that his company had wanted tenants to agree to a demolition clause, which would have allowed Deecorp to tear down the building and rebuild without any financial penalty.
Neither Lirag nor Walsh would confirm how long Aritzia’s lease is or whether Aritzia agreed to a demolition clause. Including sub-brands, such as Wilfred and TNA, the Aritzia Group has a total of 64 locations. It plans to have a total of 75 stores across North America by the end of 2015, said Walsh.
Incidentally, Vancouver and Seattle both simultaneously became the first cities in which a Starbucks ever served brewed coffee.
That happened when Schultz bought Starbucks in 1987. He had previously worked for Starbucks, when it only served beans and spices. He then quit after the then-owners rejected his suggestion that the chain should serve shots, cups and other liquid coffee.
Schultz then founded a small chain of coffeeshops first in Seattle and later in Vancouver that he branded Il Giornale. The first of those in Vancouver was at the Seabus terminal. Once he bought Starbucks, he rebranded all of those Il Giornale locations as Starbucks and thus was able to claim that his company dates back to 1971.
He opened the extremely successful location at the southwest corner of Robson and Thurlow streets after he bought Starbucks and at a time when the only Starbucks location outside the U.S. was in Vancouver.
